Professional Documents
Culture Documents
in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office the Fatherland, Third Class) to the four-decades-old miniseries is its
the year after his resignation from 75-year-old Vyacheslav Tikhonov, artful blend of facts and propaganda,
the KGB, was in a 1992 documenta- who had remained a pop-culture icon presented with little effort to dis-
ry about the city government. Putin since the 1970s based on his portray- tinguish historic truth from creative
himself urged the director to stage al of Max Otto von Stierlitz.31 fiction. As a result, even today many
a famous scene from the miniseries Russians derive their understanding
finale—Stierlitz’s long drive back An important lesson that Vlad- of the wartime US-Soviet relation-
to Berlin after his final mission, as imir Putin—and indeed, any polit- ship largely from old memories of
the iconic theme music plays—with ical leader who studies the role of watching Seventeen Moments of
Putin himself as Stierlitz. This “hom- misinformation in consolidating Spring, cheering Stierlitz’s noble ef-
age” to Russia’s most beloved fic- power—might have drawn from this
tional spy both announced Vladimir
Putin to the nation as a former KGB
officer and helped launch his national
political career.28
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Endnotes
1. CIA website, Special Collection, document titled MUELLER, HEINRICH VOL. 2 0027. pdf, document num-
ber 519b7f99993294098d5131d5, (accessed 30 January 2017), https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/
519b7f99993294098d5131d5.
2. “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” Sovlit.net website, 12 November 2014 (accessed 23 January 2017), http://www.sovlit.net/17moments.
3. Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War (Viking, 2016), chapter 8. Clips from the 1992
documentary in question can be viewed in an online article on pbs.org, Tim Malloy, “Watch Part of a Film Commissioned by Vladimir
Putin—About Himself,” published 12 January 2015 (accessed 2 March 2017), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/watch-part-of-
a-film-commissioned-by-vladimir-putin-about-himself.
4. Ivan Zasoursky, Media and Power in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2004), 144.
5. Encyclopedia.com, “French Influence on Russia” (accessed 6 February 2017), http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-al-
manacs-transcripts-and-maps/french-influence-russia.
6. Christopher R. Moran and Robert Johnson, “In the Service of Empire: Imperialism and the British Spy Thriller 1901–1914,” Studies in
Intelligence 54, no. 2 (June 2010): 1–20.
7. Paul Brown, “Report on the IRR File on the Red Orchestra,” National Archives website (accessed 3 February 2017), https://www.
archives.gov/iwg/research-papers/red-orchestra-irr-file.html.
8. Elena Prokhorova, Fragmented Mythologies: Soviet TV Mini-Series of the 1970s (doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2003),
33.
9. Ibid., 63.
10. Igor Pomoranzev, “The Case of the Missing Russian Crime Novel,” Radio Free Europe website, published 31 July 2009 (accessed 1
February 2017), http://ww”w.rferl.org/a/The_Case_Of_The_Missing_Russian_Crime_ Novel/1789846.html.
11. World Heritage Encyclopedia, reprinted on Project Gutenberg website (accessed 31 January 2017), http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/
vladimir_yefimovich_semichastny.
12. Yuri Zhukov, Komsomolskaya Pravda, 30 September 1965, reprinted in Jeremy Black’s The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming’s
Novels to the Silver Screen (Praeger, 2000), 6.
13. Andrew Nette, “A Proletarian James Bond?”, Overlord 214 (Autumn 2014) (accessed 20 January 2017) https://overland.org.au/previ-
ous-issues/issue-214/feature-andrew-nette/.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Cecile Vaissie, “False Nazis and True Chekists,” in The Cold War and Entertainment Television, ed. Lori Maguire (Cambridge Scholars,
2016), 107–20.
17. Ibid., 111.
18. “Office of Strategic Services: Secret Intelligence Branch,” CIA public website, published 19 November 2009 (accessed 6 February
2017), https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/oss-secret-intelligence-branch.html.
19. Hedrick Smith, “Soviet Spy Thriller ‘Exposes’ U.S. Plot,” New York Times, 7 January 1974.
20. David MacFadyen, Red Stars: Personality and the Popular Soviet Song (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 115.
21. Prokhorova, Fragmented Mythologies, 103.
22. Ibid.
23. Vaissie, “False Nazis,” 112.
24. Greg Afinogeniov, “A Portrait of Bureaucracy in Twelve Parts: Seventeen Moments,” in Idiom, March 2010 (accessed 31 January 2017),
http://idiommag.com/2010/03/a-portrait-of-bureaucracy-in-twelve-parts-seventeen-moments/.
25. “Vashatedil’s Blog” (accessed 30 January 2017), https://vahshatedil.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/Stierlitz-jokes-the-funniest-i-have-ever-
read/ .
26. Hedrick Smith, The Russians (Ballantine, 1976), 432–34.
27. Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice (Routledge, 2003), 6.
28. Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia, chapter 8.
29. Ibid.
30. Zasoursky, Media and Power, 136.
31. “Putin Decorates Beloved Screen Spy,” Moscow Times, 10 February 2003 (accessed 19 January 2017), http://old.themoscowtimes.com/
sitemap/free/2003/2/article/putin-decorates-beloved-screen-spy/240496.html.
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